Most college dormitories are a mixture of unmade beds, fireproof carpeting, beer pong, ramen noodles and that poster of John Belushi in “Animal House.” Investors want to add two more ingredients: successful start-ups and budding venture capitalists.

“We’re trying to help students feel what it is to run a start-up, to take an idea that starts in a dorm room with a bunch of friends and move it out to the market, into the hands of real customers, and hopefully learn what it feels like to build something people really love,” said Phin Barnes, a partner at the venture firm First Round Capital, which is based in Philadelphia.

In September, First Round started the Dorm Room Fund, putting $500,000 in the hands of an 11-member investment team of college students from the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. The board has already considered some 200 student-led ventures in the Philadelphia area and selected six for investments averaging $20,000 apiece. The recipients include Firefly, a developer of co-browsing customer support software, and Dagne Dover, a handbag and accessories brand. And starting this spring, First Round is taking the Dorm Room Fund nationwide. Read more…

Twice in 2011, Stacy Spikes tried to start a subscription service for going to the movies. Called MoviePass, it offered cinephiles nearly unlimited access to theaters – up to one 2-D film each day – for a flat monthly fee. Mr. Spikes hoped his service would transform the industry; he wanted to see it go big. But something always got in the way.

When an initial test run was announced in San Francisco, about 19,000 people signed up in a single day to try the service. But theater chains balked. Mr. Spikes had arranged to purchase users’ individual tickets through a third-party supplier; the theaters claimed they weren’t in the loop. “Their feeling was, ‘You didn’t come to us first. You didn’t get this approved,” said Mr. Spikes, 44, a former movie-marketing executive. And without the theaters’ cooperation, the test never got off the ground.

A few months later, Mr. Spikes tried another iteration of MoviePass. But some users didn’t like that the new system required them to print out vouchers. Theater managers found them slow to process, too. Each voucher had a single-use credit card number, so cashiers had to key them all in by hand.

Mr. Spikes didn’t surrender, though. He rolled out a third version of MoviePass in October. This time, he believes it’s foolproof. Read more…

In 2005, Valla Vakili fell in love with a French crime novel. He was so fascinated by “Total Chaos” and its antihero, a hard-drinking detective from the slums of Marseille, that he rerouted a planned vacation through that city, which is France’s second-largest. There he immersed himself in the character’s world.

“I ate some of the same food, drank some of the same wine,” said Mr. Vakili, a former Yahoo executive. “I felt like I was continuing the experience of the book, and it was pretty awesome.”

The adventure drove him to create Small Demons, a literary search engine that appeared online two years ago. Small Demons catalogs and cross-indexes the people, places and things that appear in books, encouraging readers to explore a world Mr. Vakili calls “the storyverse.” Browsing Small Demons, he explained, is like “getting sucked down the literary rabbit hole and finding all these weird connections.” But is that a business? Read more…

In an article The Times has just published, I profile four young ventures vying to help shorten to-do lists for small-business owners this holiday season. Please chime in at the bottom of this post with your own experiences offloading tasks to services that promise to lighten your load. To get things rolling, I’ve reached out to a few small businesses that use the companies featured in the article. Here are their tales:

The Gold-Plated Vacuum Cleaner

If your business wanted to sell a $1 million gold-plated vacuum cleaner – or at least get people talking about it – what would you do? Commission a two-minute rap, of course.

That, in any case, is what GoVacuum did. In June, the company began a golden-vacuum campaign devised by Justin Haver, its vice president of sales and marketing. Mr. Haver’s boss agreed to let him try the weird stunt if he could keep it cheap. Read more…

Sean Wycliffe knew “The King’s Speech” had gotten rave reviews. So when he arrived at the theater about two years ago, he was surprised by what he saw. “It was a great movie, but the place was just empty,” he said. “It had 230 or 240 seats, but there was me and a couple and that was it.”

Mr. Wycliffe had just completed his bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Midway through, he’d taken time off to start a small marketing firm with his brother. Now he hankered to build something new.

He found himself thinking about Hotwire and Priceline, the discount sites he’d used for several years to book hotel rooms that would otherwise go unoccupied. “What if we could partner with theaters and help them fill their seats in the same way?” he wondered. Moviegoers would pay for discounted tickets, specifying the film, the approximate time of day and the neighborhood. After completing a purchase, they would learn the exact showtime and theater. Read more…

When Alan Hall saw a hardworking neighbor fall asleep at­ a meeting, he knew something was wrong. The man, Mr. Hall learned, had been laid off and taken on three new jobs – newspaper delivery in the morning, accounting in the afternoon, managing a convenience store by night – to support his family.

“He was barely keeping his nose above water,” said Mr. Hall, a co-founder and managing director of Mercato Partners, an investment firm. So Mr. Hall asked a company in which he is an angel investor to hire the man, who holds an M.B.A., and offered to cover his starting salary. More than a year later, his neighbor is still at work and thriving.

Mr. Hall said the experience made him wonder: “How many millions of Americans in the United States today are unemployed or underemployed and going through the same stress that Phil was? What can I do to help?” With a windfall behind him – Mr. Hall had sold MarketStar, a global sales and marketing firm he founded, to the Omnicom Group in 1999 – he’d also amassed the resources to attempt a solution. Read more…

At the time, Mr. Burkhart, a co-founder, said staffing was his biggest challenge. Aiming for ambitious growth – 25 cities in five years – he created a six-month leadership program for nurturing young talent. He called it SEED, for Start-up Education and Entrepreneurial Development.

H.Bloom has since expanded from three markets – New York City, Chicago and the District of Columbia – to five, adding San Francisco in February and Dallas this month. The company grew to 75 full-time employees, from 38. It raised another $10 million in angel and venture capital, Mr. Burkhart said, for a total of $18 million. And it now serves nearly 500 corporate customers – more than twice as many as a year ago – that account for 85 percent of revenue. (Here’s a story about other Web businesses that use subscription models.)

When we checked in early last fall, Zach Brown, the first graduate of SEED, had just been dispatched to Chicago. Now the 25-year-old is running a 12-person operation there and the city is on track to bring in $1 million in annual revenue, said Mr. Burkhart. We followed up with a few questions to learn more about the training program: Read more…

Two-thirds of Americans don’t want advertisers tracking them on the Internet, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California. But that hasn’t slowed the growth of online behavioral advertising, the industry that harvests data about Web habits and uses it to target individual consumers with ads.

For advertisers, “data exhaust” – the digital traces you generate while browsing the Web – has monetary value. Often, the information gets collected and sold behind the user’s back. But what if users could cash in on their own data?

Enter Enliken, a start-up that encourages consumers to sell their own data. Enliken’s users voluntarily download software that tracks their online activity. A personal dashboard lets them limit what gets captured and sold to advertisers. Users pick one of several independent charities to receive the proceeds, while Enliken takes a 10-percent cut. The company’s founders hope that, someday, users will be able to earn a wide range of perks – from airline miles to online news subscriptions – in exchange for their information. Read more…

For more than a year now, Andrew Yang has been traveling the nation evangelizing Venture for America. From gritty inner cities to college campuses and the White House, the former corporate lawyer has made dozens of stops pitching the nonprofit organization, which he hopes will become a Teach for America for young entrepreneurs.

Ten months after we covered his early efforts to send fresh talent to start-ups in struggling cities, the first 40 Venture for America fellows have made it through a five-week boot camp. They’ve fanned out across New Orleans, Las Vegas, Detroit, Providence and Cincinnati. They’re now starting two-year jobs at an eclectic array of start-ups, ranging from Are You a Human, which designs game-based verification systems to thwart spam bots, to Kickboard, an online dashboard that helps teachers track student performance and behavior. Read more…

For new graduates, shifting from college to a full-time job can deliver a jolt of culture shock. That’s doubly true for those who join start-ups, where teams are small and newcomers are often expected to acclimate quickly, finding their way without much formal training.

Enter Boston Startup School. Designed as a “finishing school” for young people seeking jobs in the city’s tech start-up scene, the program’s inaugural six-week session graduated 72 students this month. It was directed by Aaron O’Hearn, who also heads up special projects at TechStars Boston, where the idea for the program grew out of the awareness that most start-ups have little time for human resources, recruiting and professional development. “We wanted to graduate people who can operate with ambiguity, who can understand where they are and what needs to get done,” Mr. O’Hearn said. Read more…

About

You're the Boss offers an insider's perspective on small-business ownership. It gives business owners a place where they can compare notes, ask questions, get advice, and learn from one another's mistakes. The blog also offers analysis of policy issues, and suggests investing tips.